The symbiotic theatre: an evolutionary view of what's inside our heads apart from brain.
With apologies to Wole Soyinka

Wednesday, May 08, 2013

Dual inheritance, Sir Isaac Newton and the tale of Nob

The myth at the centre of Shakespeare’s Othello is that of the cuckold, the husband with horns on his head
whose wife is playing elsewhere.There
is a deep biological root here.A child
has two parents.A woman always knows
whether a child is hers.A man never
knows.Okay, now with genetic testing we
do.But I mean knows sether, deep down in the ideoverse knows.There is monogamy throughout the animal
kingdom, but it’s never incompatible with a quicky behind a rock, uh?!, don’t
know how it happened, over before I realised what was going on.Yea?

Human beings are not as lions. A male lion when it drives out the master of
the pride and becomes the alpha nob will kill all extant cubs and start again.Thus its genes have a clear run. Human males are often quite happy to bring up
the male offspring of their mate that they themselves have not begotten, and
can do it with kindness and affection.I
was brought up by such a man, sethren.When he married my mother he did not put the five year old me to the
sword.So it would seem that the biological
imperative, so persuasive among lions, is weak in men.What’s going on?

Dual inheritance, sethren.What breeds in the metaverse is not genetic.Isaac Newton had no children, but we are all
his heirs.Now it so happens that in Isaac’s village of Woolsthorpe
by Colsterworth there also lived a strapping lad called Nob the Nob.The guy was a legend.There was no virgin for miles around he did
not deflower, no buxom wench he did not inseminate, no matron he did not move
to transports of ecstasy behind the potting shed, no menopausal chatelaine he
did not plunge into one last bout of child-bearing.Poor Isaac, on the other hand, was born so
small his mother said he would fit into a quart pot, probably was on the
spectrum, never married, and has no recorded offspring.Whereas, in the same way all of us are
descended from Charles ll, at least one Neanderthal ancestor and Jenghis Khan,
there is nobody born in Britain, unless your Mum arrived in the last year
already pregnant, whose genes, or some of them, have not passed through the nob
of Nob the Nob.

And yet, do we boast of poor Nob?We have never even heard of him, you
say.Prove that he ever existed.Exactly.Like God, Nob’s existence or non-existence makes absolutely fuck-all (a
category that must have existed long before an Indian accountant invented zero)
difference to any of us.Whereas our
cultural inheritance from Isaac Newton is immeasurable.And the cleverer you are (not in a Blair/Cameron
sort of way, but in a Jim al-Khalili sort of way) the more you owe Sir Isaac.On the shoulders of giants.Of course we have to be aware that differential
calculus, like everything else, evolved over aeons.But there’s no denying that some ideoverses
bring a lot of evolution together in a fusion event that produces a flash of
light to illuminate the world considerably more than the glow of Nob’s nob
after a hard day’s work.

So, sethren, another paradox.The more talented (and I won’t go into meandering
lucubrations about what that word might mean, think Jay-Z, Richard Dawkins) you
are, the more cultural descendants you will have.Genetic descendants are often a problem, on
the other hand. Think of our poor dear
Queen.

Shakespeare is one of the greatest cultural ancestors of
them all.Yet cuckoldry had a prominent
place in his ideoverse.Why?

Culturally, cuckoldry is not about loss of genetic
inheritance.It’s about scorn.And of course, sether, it is not just men who
feel it, why should it be.It’s a human
ill.That you are being made a fool
of.That people are laughing at you, or
even worse pitying you, behind your back.Impotent rage, where all that you can do is kill the one who has created
this situation, is not about the chance that is not being given to your
genes.It’s about metaversal
humiliation.

And of course the more noble, dignified and imperious the
cuckold, the greater the humiliation.But you are hungry, sethren.What
we will look at tomorrow is the evolution of a micro-myth, just between Iago
and Othello.Madam MeMe is absent from
the layby opposite.Now her waggons,
brimming with the slop of mechanically recovered carnage, go straight to the
beyond-hope.They stand in line, mouths open,
while the slurry is hosed along the level of their heads.Not efficient, most of it goes elsewhere than
down the throats of the destitute, but they can wipe it off and smear it in in
their own time; and now Madam Meme is part of the Big Society, has juicy government
contracts under the cheeks of her massive arse, her concern is not nutrition,
but accumulation. The rigour of the
market applies.No gain without
pain.But what shall we feast on today,
sethren?M&S prawn and avocado is
rumoured to be good.Off you fuck.

About Me

Old man, still puzzled, amused, horrified by the world. Question struck me, why are human beings, individually so intelligent, collectively so stupid? We have religious, political, factual beliefs that look like certainties. Yet if one lot is right (Yaweh is God, debt is sin) the rest of us are in error. That means most of us are wrong most of the time. How’s that work?
Seems we’re not rational creatures, though one of our special tricks is we can “do” reason. Our big brains are an environment where culture evolves. Survival is the driving force of culture, and a lie can usually survive better than the truth. Culture? Darwinian process in the virtual space where all our brains meet—not mystical, any more than cyberspace. Real, where processes continue. Needs discussion. So I blog about it.
I also have a life. A novel, Bad to the Bone, some plays on. I read, eat, drink a lot. My grandchildren say I swear too much, but what’s just enough? Crazy about mountain and road biking. I talk a bit, my wife says. Love music. The person who I have most admired ever is Wangari Maathai. Brother Jero is just the voice that comes to me when I try to blog about Evoculture.